


Se’ennight or what you rob

by MymbleHowl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Its quite vague, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24707269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MymbleHowl/pseuds/MymbleHowl
Summary: “What land is this?” “This is Harlaw lady?”The Drowned God has washed Sansa onto the shores of the Iron Islands and she is all alone again, in another place where she might end up a bargain or a prize or worse.She’ll just have to take her fate and everyone else’s hearts into her own hands.
Relationships: Robb Stark/Margaery Tyrell, Sansa Stark/Margaery Tyrell, Theon Greyjoy/Robb Stark, Theon Greyjoy/Sansa Stark
Kudos: 30





	Se’ennight or what you rob

**Author's Note:**

> I have pinned, tucked, pleated and accidentally rent canon to make this story and patched in quite a lot of Shakespeare too.
> 
> Sansa is dressed as a boy, so Theon and Margaery use male pronouns to think about her, whereas the text stills use female pronouns when it’s from Sansa’s point of view. Theon and Margaery also don’t appear to have asked Sansa for her name.

“What land is this?” The bedraggled passenger asked the Captain as she stepped from the skiff into shallow pebbley water.  
  
“This is Harlaw, lady.” He replied.  
  
Sansa paused, she was all alone again, in another place where she might end up a bargain or a prize or worse. She looked at the castle in the distance, a thousand questions flew through her head. Might she go there, to the seat of Theon’s mother’s family, would they let her send a raven? Where to? To Castle Black? Not to Brienne, because Brienne might be anywhere, in her hunt for Arya. Would they give her to King Balon? As a hostage?  
  
“Have you a family who you might send word to?” the Captain asked.  
  
“That was my brother, taken by the waves, we were last ones left.” The sob died in her throat, she almost retched instead.  
  
“Come,” said the captain, “I know a woman here, we can get dry at least.”  
  
The Captain spoke with the two remaining crew members. Sansa followed him up off the beach, there were rows of cottages, turned this way and that by the line of the coast and the roll of the hill, after a while they came to one where the Captain knocked and pushed the door open soon after.  
  
“Alys?” He called.  
  
“Yeah?” a woman’s voice answered “Oh…it must have been all summer if it’s been a day.”  
  
“Not quite,” the Captain replied, “Five years or so, any more weans?”  
  
“No I’m past that, thank the Drowned God.”  
  
“What is dead may never die.” The captain replied as if by rote.  
  
“Come in. Who’s this?” said the woman looking slightly affronted at Sansa.  
  
“Passenger, The Golden Scythe went down last night, we were lucky to be dragged down here by the drowned God”  
  
“How many lost?”  
  
“Four crew, one passenger, what is dead may never die,” he said again with more feeling than before.  
  
Alys nodded to him, “It’s the way you’d want to go.”  
  
Sansa did retch then and sob, she wasn’t sure how long for. She crouched down as if she were trying to make herself small.  
  
“Was her brother. The passenger.” The captain said by way of explanation.  
  
“Oh girly,” said the woman putting a hand on Sansa’s shoulder, “you can sit at least. Well, he’s in the sea, where he’s free to roam a God’s halls, not rotting in the earth, bones held fast.”  
  
She gave Sansa some hot smoky fish and a kind of pancake and something warm, slimy and green, all heaped on the one plate. Sansa ate it all, since she didn’t know what else to do.  
  
In the cottage’s other room, which was just a box bed and a cot and a wooden chest, the woman helped Sansa take off her wet clothes and lent her a shift and a woollen dress which was too short. She seemed to pity Sansa and offered to wash the sea water out of Sansa’s heavy cloak and her petticoats. The wet dress itself was hardly better than the one she had on now, it was the serving girl’s dress in which she had saved Robb, in which she had failed to save her mother, and actually, failed to save Robb, as it turned out.  
  
“Could I get a job at Ten Towers?”  
  
“I doubt it, Lady Harlaw says she’s in mourning, for the next seven years.” Alys replied.  
  
“Did Lord Harlaw die?”  
  
“Aye, both of them, one after the other, just after the Kingsmoot.”  
  
“What’s the Kingsmoot?” asked Sansa.  
  
“Where they choose the new King. Course they haven’t had one for hundreds of years until 4 moons ago.”  
  
“Is Lord..sorry King Balon dead too?” Sansa felt her eyes widen.  
  
“Aye, his daughter Yara’s King now.”  
  
Sansa bit back the not Theon question that had burst in her head.  
  
“So, she’s at Pyke? Could I go there for a job?” I have to have a plan Sansa thought, earn enough to get a passage north.  
  
“No, she’s out on the sea, chasing down her uncles,” Alys replied.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Probably to kill them if she’s any sense.” Alys shrugged “Part of the power games the highborn play?”  
  
“Well they might still need people though? In the castle?”  
  
“They definitely do, but not you girly.”  
  
“Why not?” demanded Sansa.  
  
Alys did not seem to hear the petulance in Sansa’s voice. “Well Lord Greyjoy’s chucked out all the women.”  
  
“But I thought you said…”  
  
“Lord Theon Greyjoy, King Yara’s brother and a more unsalted boy, I have never seen, even if he sailed with his sister for a year after he escaped the Young Wolf’s clutches.”  
  
“Lord Theon Greyjoy’s not employing any women?” Sansa asked incredulous.  
  
“No and the whole castle’s gone to shit apparently, still what did he expect?”  
  
“But why?”  
  
“Oh it’s all part of some silly game he’s playing with Lady Harlaw, he said he loved her, or some such, she said she wasn’t seeing anyone for seven years, he carried on that he loved her, was pining away for her, she said he could hardly compare to her dead husband since he was doubtless with a different wench every night, he said he would never look at another woman until he could look at her and so on.”  
  
Sansa could feel a kind of hysterical giggling bubbling up inside her, of course Theon would do something as stupid as dismissing all the women in his employ as some silly joke or to prove his prowess.  
  
“Exactly,” said Alys in response to Sansa’s laughter. “Still they’re neither of them Iron at all, she’s some grand Reach thing, and he was the prisoner of those craven Starks so long, it’s doubtful he knows what salt even smells like.”  
  
A plan was forming in Sansa’s mind, a strange ridiculous plan. Sansa wasn’t sure what the point of the plan was, maybe just to see Theon, someone familiar, who wasn’t dead or lost or far away.  
  
“Do you have any boy’s clothes?” she asked, “I’d trade my cloak and dress for them.”  


*

  
Theon looked at the boy, he wore island clothes, but he was clearly a mainlander, it was in the set of his feet, or hips. He was highborn enough, a steward’s son, or a bastard maybe, he certainly looked down a lot, like Jon had, as if afraid that Theon might see him, but somehow it was Robb the boy reminded him of. Certainly the shaft of sunlight from the embrasure had revealed the fire in his hair, but maybe everything reminded Theon of Robb just now, since the musician had come.  
  
The musician’s tale replayed in Theon’s head, how a Frey child had kept a knife at his back to keep him playing, how he had closed his eyes against the blood, how they had taken the Young Wolf’s body and sewed on his wolf’s head. Though the last was not what the musician had actually seen, it was just a tale traded, as he fled. Theon knew why the Freys had let him go, they wanted this ruthlessness, this hideousness, trumpeted to the rest of Westeros.  
  
Theon gave a short nod, “You can have a job. What is it you can do?”  
  
There was a pause.  
  
“I can, can serve at table. I can write. I can…”  
  
“I have a maester and a steward to write for me.” He laughed.  
  
“They surely don’t write your love letters to Lady Harlaw?” The boy said with a teasing tone.  
  
Yara’s steward laughed and Theon saw he had to laugh too, or the joke was on him.  
  
“Aye, you can help me with Lady Harlaw, come sit beside me a while and think on some pretty words to woo her to my side.” Theon motioned to a stool, and the boy sat down awkwardly, with the lithe confused limbs of an adolescent.  
  
“If music be the food of love play on.” He said to the musician in the jauntiest tone he could manage and raised his cup of ale and tried not to think of Robb.  


*  


Sansa seemed to fall into a role as a general errand boy for Theon, which she found fairly annoying for several reasons. For one she could have clearly been put into a more useful task, no one was changing the bed linen in the private chambers, she noticed, or sweeping and laying new rushes in the great hall, and Theon’s solar was thick with dust. For another, running errands in a castle you don’t know, especially one interconnected by slimy, swaying rope bridges, is fairly difficult. Still in three days her balance had definitely improved, also, the fear of tipping into the sea eradicated Robb from her mind for those few focussed minutes and she was glad she hadn’t had to traverse any of the ridiculous bridges in skirts, which would surely have felt doubly precarious. Finally, being around Theon gave her a horrible nausea that he would eventually actually see her.  
  
As his squire helped him take off the mail he had worn to practice fighting, Theon, his eyes towards the glorious blue sky, said to her, “I’ll take the cutter out this afternoon. Run to the kitchen keep and get some provisions.” When she left him he was still looking at the sky, as if searching for something in it.  
  
The kitchens, which Sansa knew should have been teeming, had but one man and four boys in, and would only give a crisp dry thing that they called biscuit, some salted fish and two waxy oranges.  
  
She took this scant picnic to the stableyard. As she went to put it into Theon’s saddle bag, he said, “No, put it into Gevin’s, you can be in charge of it.”  
  
She frowned up at him.  
  
“You can ride, right?” Theon responded, “Gevin barely can and looks sick on a horse.” Theon’s squire, who must have been only eleven or twelve years, looked sick off a horse at this accusation, or maybe sick that he was having to get on a horse.  
  
She had to sit behind Gevin, whispering tips and reassurances, as she had done years ago with Bran, though she and Bran had fitted better onto the one saddle.  
  
When Gevin turned to her to ask “Why does he take you about everywhere? He has only known you three days,” Sansa was forced to grab the reins to slow the horse.  
  
At Lordsport, Theon and Gevin quickly fitted the cutter’s mast and drew up the material Sansa had thought was just a cover for the little boat as a sail.  
  
“You look as nervous as Gevin on a horse.” Theon said to her as she stepped in.  
  
“I was shipwrecked. My brother was drowned.”  
  
“Aye, a Harlaw captain, who should have been in my sister’s fleet but chose to run a sloop for the gold price, gets dragged into the bay he sailed in as a boy, you were blessed lad.”  
  
“But not my brother.”  
  
“Better an oarsman for a God, than rotting in the ground, or worse.” There was an odd look on Theon’s face as he said this. At least the sun glared at him, Sansa thought, so she could look at him without him truly seeing her.  
  
They sailed out to the bay. Gevin took off his clothes and swam. Theon had taken off his jerkin, and rolled up the sleeves of his tunic, his forearms, were marked with black, the left repeated symbols like a logbook, the right a swirl like the illustration down the side of a prayer book for the Seven.  
  
“What do they mean?” she asked.  
  
“What?” said Theon, who had his back to her.  
  
“The marks.”  
  
“The tattoos?” he said, and turned around and brushed something from his eyes as he did so. Without warning he pulled off the tunic, his body was landscape, muscle and scars, shining in the sun.  
  
“These mark raids, reivings, and they would mark sea-battles too,” he said proffering his left arm, “This marks the things I’ve done on a boat, manning the oars, tacking the sail.” She looked at his right arm, an oar knotted about with rope.  
  
“It should go further up,” he added, “But I was a hostage in Winterfell and there was little chance to sail.” He looked as if he was trying to joke.  
  
They were both silent. She watched at the sea. He did not put the tunic back on but showed her the hand of the storm god, on his back, pointing down a lightning bolt for each of the two storms he had sailed in and the hand of the drowned god pushing him back up with bubble for each time he had been dipped in seawater and blessed, once as a baby and once on his return to Pyke.  
  
“Tomorrow, you can go to Ten Towers, Gevin can sail you over, and beg Lady Harlaw to let me cloak her or pledge to her in saltwater or whatever marriage ceremony she would prefer.” Sansa wondered if his smile was for this Lady Harlaw.  
  
“What should I say to Lady Harlaw?”  
  
Theon scoffed raucously, “Tell her the kind of things knights tell ladies in stories, I suppose, ladies like her like that, don’t they?”  
  
“I wouldn’t know,” Sansa replied as blankly as she could.  
  
Theon lay down in the little boat, his face towards the sun, they swayed gently with the waves. Gevin swam up to the side and hung on, still half in the water.  
  
“She is very beautiful. She seems like she floated here out of a story herself.” Theon said “Actually, fuck that, only a third of the ladies I have known liked knights and stories.”  
  
“Okay,” she answered unsure where Theon was going, “What did the other two thirds like?”  
  
“All three of them thought they should be able to do whatever they fucking wanted, whether that was swordfighting, or marrying princes, or captaining ships.”  
  
“Three? I thought..” Sansa said, her body tense.  
  
“I’ve known plenty of women, and girls, lad. I meant ladies with the standing of Lady Harlaw.” He sighed, his face was still towards the sun and there was a slight smile on it, different to the grin he used to unnerve you.  
  
“So?” Sansa prompted.  
  
Theon grunted.  
  
“What should I say to Lady Harlaw?” she asked again.  
  
“Tell her I’ll let her do whatever she wants, when she’s my wife.”  
  
I wonder if he will Sansa thought to herself, and what it was that Lady Harlaw wanted as badly as she herself had wanted to marry a prince.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Margaery’s steward came to her, to say that Lord Greyjoy’s lad was at the Sea Gate and they could not seem to send him away.  
  
“Tell him he shan’t speak with me,” Margaery commanded.  
  
“He has been told that lady, but he says some nonsense about how he’ll stand as a doorpost and wait, but that he will speak with you,” the Steward replied.  
  
Margaery humphed, and put down her sewing which was going very ill anyway. She started to wonder whether Lord Greyjoy’s obstinate squire might be a pleasurable little plaything for an hour or so.  
  
“What kind of man is he?” she asked.  
  
“He’s smooth and shrill, but that’s mainlanders, one would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him.”  
  
Margaery nodded and wondered if the youth was pretty.  
  
“Let him approach and send the lady Merry to me.”  
  
Merry came in, frowning slightly and arranged Margaery’s gown and pinned a coy lace veil Margaery had suggested to cover her face and the loose, tumultuous curls of her hair. The veil only made Merry frown more. When she was finished Merry sat down beside her on the settle.  
  
The boy was pretty, with glinting copper hair, and a lip he bit as he waited. He was tall too and looked authoritatively from Margaery to Merry.  
  
“The honourable lady of the house, which is she?” he asked.  
  
“I shall answer for her,” Margaery replied, and was glad how much her veil hid her smile.  
  
“Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty, are you the lady of the house? For I never saw her and I wouldn’t want to throw away my beautiful speech.”  
  
“Where do you come from, ser?” Margaery countered.  
  
“Not here,” the youth replied, “I am well enough versed in the etiquette of addressing a lady and that is what I am willing to say. Give me assurance that you are Lady Margaery Harlaw, and I may proceed.”  
  
Margaery laughed then, “Are you a comedian?” she asked.  
  
“No, by my profound heart,” he replied and he appeared affronted, “Are you the lady of the house or not?”  
  
“If I do not usurp myself, I am.” Margaery watched the youth struggle to keep his benign polished composure and decided he was even prettier when he frowned.  
  
“One could say you do usurp yourself, in reserving yourself from love, Lady,” the youth shook his head and his hair rippled and shifted like flames, Margaery looked as surreptitiously as she could at Merry and saw that Merry’s eyes were flicking to her, full of laughter or mischeviousness.  
  
“That is part of my argument,” the youth continued, flustered “But I will return to praise first and then get to the heart of my message.”  
  
“Oh,” Margaery interrupted, “Just come to what is important and leave off the praise.”  
  
The youth tutted a little sadly. “But, it’s poetical, the praise,” he protested.  
  
“Well I am sure I will have heard something similar before,” she replied “I plead with you to keep it in.” She looked directly into his bright blue eyes through the lace and continued, “I heard you were saucy at my Sea Gate and let you in to divert me rather than harangue me. If you are not brazen, be gone, and if you are sane, be brief.”  
  
The youth bit his lip as he had when he entered, there was something about him, the tilt of his head, his perfect smooth chin, that reminded Margaery of sitting in a rose bower long ago, holding a girl’s chin and the tiny lip flutter of a practise kiss, and the spluttered giggles that followed.  
  
“Will you go ser?” said Merry.  
  
“No, I will stay a little longer,” the lad turned again to Margaery, “Tell me your mind, sweet lady, I am a messenger.”  
  
“You must have some hideous matter to deliver that you do not get on with it,” Margaery replied.  
  
“My words are for your ears only, is all,” the youth responded more gently, “I bring no overture of war, my words are full of peace.”  
  
“Yet you began rudely. What is it you would say?”  
  
“I should say Lady Harlaw, that I think my rudeness only a mirror of your own.” He looked at her, with as polite and unmoving a masque as Lady Stark had had whilst negotiating with Margaery’s husband the bestowing of a Kingship upon her son. “What I would say is to your ears divinity, but to others profanity,” the youth concluded.  
  
She turned to Merry and said in a mock whisper, “Well, I want to hear the profanity, give us the place alone.”  
  
Merry got up and flicked her eyes flirtatiously at the lad as she left.  
  
“Ser?”  
  
“Most sweet lady” began the youth.  
  
“Stop, that’s an easy trope, where do your words come from?”  
  
“From Lord Greyjoy’s heart.”  
  
“Oh, I have read Lord Greyjoy’s heart’s text. It’s heresy. Have you any more to say?”  
  
“Lady, let me see your face,” the youth pleaded.  
  
“Why? Did Lord Greyjoy ask you to specifically to negotiate with my face?” and still laughing Margaery swished back the veil and tilted her head so she had to look up at the pretty copper haired youth with wide, honeyed eyes. “Look ser, is it not well done?”  
  
“Marvellously,” the youth replied, “If the Gods did all.”  
  
Margaery put her hand to mouth, as if shocked, this boy really was a pleasing diversion. “It will persist in wind and rain.”  
  
“You have beauty truly captured then,” he said to her, “Nature’s sweet, clever hand must have formed you from gold and roses.” He reached his hand towards her and Margaery imagined he wanted to touch her hair and let his fingers drift through her curls. He continued, “Lady, you are the cruellest woman alive, if you would take this grace to the grave and leave no copy.”  
  
So Margaery stood up, the swollen curve of the babe in her belly, clear against the thin silk. “Oh, ser, I am not so hard hearted as that.”  
  
The youth quickly pulled back his polite masque and Margaery sat down again.  
  
“Still,” the youth did not frown as he paused this time, but his eyes flicked the room, “my lord and master loves you.”  
  
“How does he love me?” Margaery asked wanting to bathe now in this double adoration.  
  
“With promises, with reverence, with sighs, without composure, with stormy looks, with tears.”  
  
“Tears? Still Lord Greyjoy knows my mind. I cannot love him. He is as noble as any man and I suppose he has virtues of a kind, he would entertain a wife no doubt, nature formed him well too, and pricked him out for women’s pleasure, if rumours run true. But, yet I cannot love him.”  
  
The youth was blushing, but he persisted, “If I loved you as my Lord does, I would not understand your denial.”  
  
“Why what would you do?” Margaery asked.  
  
“I don’t know, make a willow cabin at your gate, send my soul within these towers, though you would deny my body, write poems of my love and sing them in the dead of night. Call out your name, Oh Margaery, until you pitied me.”  
  
Margaery raised her eyebrows. “You might do that yet,” she said, swallowing the hope from her voice, “What is your parentage?”  
  
“Above my current fortune, though I am well enough even now, compared to others,” he replied.  
  
She tried to give the youth a purse of coins as he left but he would not take it. So, she lay back on the settle and thought about his skin, pink, at the thought of women’s pleasure, she thought about taking hold of his hair and pulling him to her for a kiss.  
  
  
*

  
There was a frown on the youth’s face when he returned from Harlaw, even in the half darkness, Theon could tell.  
  
“Well?” Theon demanded, “What did she say?”  
  
“She said,” the youth bit his lip, it reminded Theon of someone, did Robb used to bite his lip, he wondered. “She said,” the youth repeated, “She couldn’t love you in spite of your natural form, nobility and virtues.”  
  
“My natural form?” Theon said with half a laugh.  
  
The youth blushed “Yes, she listed various things about you that might please a wife, including that you’d been pricked for pleasure…”  
  
Theon pulled his mouth into his most impish grin and wished he could have been there to hear Lady Margaery Harlaw gossiping about his cock to this boy. “You see,” Theon found himself announcing “She is the most lovely wife for Theon Greyjoy.”  
  
“She is?” The youth asked him quietly.  
  
“There are very few young, beautiful daughters of Lord Paramounts who would be interested in my prick, they would mainly blush as you are.”  
  
“But” said the boy, “You know she is with child?”  
  
“She had the baby in her when she married my cousin, being with child is not usually an impediment to a lady marrying, almost the opposite if anything.”  
  
“Should you not be assured of your wife’s chastity?”  
  
Theon shrugged, “I am a Prince, therefore I should have a princess, and she is nearest thing I can find to that.”  
  
“What about love?”  
  
Theon thought about love, surely it had many faces. He thought, perhaps, he had only seen love, in Robb’s care of Jon, or Jon’s tenderness with Arya, in Catelyn’s motherly fire, in Sansa’s looks at that cunt of a prince. He could feel the edge of it in Robb’s care of him, or even Yara’s, and really he knew that long ago, he too had been protected by a motherly fire. Still, he didn’t want to guess what love felt like in him, not now.  
  
“I love her as much as I might love any wife, I think? I love all that fortune as bestowed upon her, her grace and wealth and beauty and wit. As much as she has been hidden here by some scandal, she still comes with alliances. What is there not to love? As for chastity, one day boy, you will learn that a little volatility in a woman is something to be harnessed.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
“But if she cannot love you? What then my lord?” Sansa looked at Theon, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was all ablaze with conviction.  
  
“I cannot be so answered, when my want is all as hungry as the sea.” Theon replied, and Sansa saw he was caught up in something and a long time ago she would have imagined that this was how love looked. Maybe it was the flipside of the coin, it was not that he needed to profess his love but that he needed to be loved, to have his hand held and to be shown the chambers of his own heart.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Sansa stepped from the cutter onto the jetty, her insides aflutter, she had felt like a mouse before, running hither and thither whilst the cat tumbled it and nudged it with its nose. Still it was just like sewing surely, she could pull the two of them neatly together, with no rent, no seam showing, even if her fingers were jabbed and bleeding from the process.  
  
The steward showed her to the gardens, the sun shone again, though it was not warm. Lady Margaery wore a thicker dress than before, it was golden, and a short jerkin, covered in embroidered roses, that emphasised the bloom of her body, heavy with child. She looked to Sansa, like a peach ready to be twisted off the tree. She looked, as Theon had argued, the nearest to a princess of anyone, and Sansa had seen actual princesses, was maybe a princess herself, once.  
  
“Give me your hand, ser.” Lady Margaery said to Sansa.  
  
“I am your servant, fair princess” Sansa said as she gave it, and Lady Margaery placed them arm in arm.  
  
“My servant, ser? Do not present feigning as a compliment, you are Lord Greyjoy’s servant, youth.”  
  
“And he is yours, your servant’s servant is your servant lady.”  
  
“I do not think of him,” Lady Margaery said, and she stopped walking and turned to Sansa “And I wish his thoughts were not of me.”  
  
“But my lady, I come again, to speak to you on his behalf.” She looked into Lady Margaery’s wide, magical eyes. Theon should come and stand before her like this, Sansa thought, and she could see them together standing in this pretty garden, their pretty mouths slightly open, the breath between them almost a kiss.  
  
“I would beg you to speak of anything else. I would rather…”  
  
“But dear Lady,” Sansa tried to interrupt.  
  
“You must understand,” and Sansa found Lady Harlaw was holding her hand “It is you my heart wants to know, my thoughts run unmuzzled to you, not Lord Greyjoy. My heart may be tyrannous, but I can hardly ignore it,” Lady Harlaw continued.  
  
“Oh” said Sansa  
  
“Don’t worry we can still smile. If one should be prey, better to be torn by the wolves, than fall poisoned, into the deep unknown.”  
  
Sansa struggled to compose herself, had this golden woman really just told her she wanted a wolf not a kraken. “I’m not sure I understand,” Sansa said quickly.  
  
But Lady Margaery laughed and said “Oh no, it was just because I was talking with my cousin by marriage of tales you are told as children, and he knew nothing of the girl in the beautiful cloak who goes off and is wooed by the wolf, his tales were all of giant squid that suck you under and people who turn into seals, or the other way about.”  
  
“I thought that story was about being wary of the wolf not wooed by it,” Sansa said.  
  
“Perhaps its is the same thing,” and Lady Margaery took the tension Sansa was failing to hide for fear of the flirtation and said “Don’t be afraid, good youth, I will not have you if you do not want me, in time your wife will get to reap a proper man. There lies your way,” and she gestured Sansa back towards the Sea Gate.  
  
“You have nothing to say to the Prince?” Sansa asked her.  
  
“Oh, you have made him a Prince now,” she responded, “I had rather you tell me what you think of me.”  
  
“I am not what you think I am,” Sansa replied, “and so I think you are not what you think you are.”  
  
Sansa went out of the garden, before she could be further confused by the scent of honey, and the glow of the woman who wanted to be wooed by a wolf.  
  
  
*  


There was drinking in the great hall and little to feast on. A fight broke out and the Steward had to intervene. The musician played on, the song sounded familiar, but no one was singing it. A while later Theon looked at her, although his eyes seemed to be swimming, and slurred “Take me to bed.”  
  
She hauled him up. Fortunately, his chambers were in the same keep, she didn’t think she could have got him across those ridiculous bridges. Once she had navigated Theon onto the bed and she began to remove his boots, he put his hand in her hair, cut short it had gained a thickness and wave she had longed for as a girl.  
  
“Remember when,” he began to say, she looked up at him quickly, and he looked down at her as he might have done before telling a joke that Robb would have clouted him for telling in Sansa’s hearing. Then the sea crashed far below them and he changed tone, “The sea” he was saying “I forgot the sea.”  
  
She sat down on a blanket chest, not knowing what to do next, but then he cried “Water” like a plaintive child, so she went out to find some.  
  
In the dark corridor someone drunk and heavy caught her.  
  
“That’s a pretty mouth,” said the man, his fingers in her cheeks as he held her chin, “it would look best around my cock.”  
  
“I’d cut your throat, first,” she said. She held the knife, with which she had killed a Frey, against his stubble.  
  
“Not that pretty, not worth the trouble.” And he slammed his shoulder against hers as he walked past her. “Especially as you’re a favourite with the Greyjoy fry, so much so, he’d probably take your puny cock in his mouth.”  
  
Outside the great hall was a boy taking empty flagons somewhere, she asked him to bring Lord Greyjoy some fresh water.  
  
Later, in her own cot, in the small hall, the snores of squires and servant boys surrounding her, she held the knife tight, one hand on the sheath and another on the handle in case anyone might proposition her. Eventually she fell into a fitful sleep and dreamt that Theon held her and put his hand inside her breeches and then whipped it out swiftly on finding she was lacking what he expected. “Fucking cheat” dream Theon hissed. She awoke and groped for the knife and tucked it, still sheathed, into the jerkin she had folded as a pillow. As she lay awake she decided she wouldn’t have held the knife to Theon, if he’d caught her like the drunken man had.  
  
  
*  
  
  
When the youth returned, Margaery took him into her solar, to press him with pretty words. It wasn’t, she felt, just a game anymore, there was something about his resistance, the persistent return to speaking for that fool Greyjoy, that lured her. The talk always turned to love, and Margaery was sure that the boy’s understanding of love was better than the Prince’s. She had no need anymore to follow status, she might reward herself with following her own tyrannous heart.  
  
“Am I your fool? That you persist in this strange courtship of me?” the youth asked.  
  
“No,” she replied, “I have been too impulsive in laying out my feelings to you, with your heart of stone.”  
  
“I wish you would bless the Prince with your boundless heart my lady. My heart is not stone, but it is my own and I would see the Prince happy and you, if you could but...”  
  
“Here” Margaery interrupted the boy “take this jewel and wear it,” he shook his head, “don’t refuse it, it has no tongue to berate you.” She tried to press it into his hands, he would not take it.  
  
She cupped his chin, he did not move away, but looked at her with those bright eyes.  
  
“What can I give you?” she asked.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There was a knight in the courtyard as she came out of the tower which Lady Margaery’s solar was in.  
  
“Come this way, ser,” the knight accosted her, “I would have reply to you.”  
  
“Reply? About what ser?” Sansa asked, incredulous.  
  
“The injury you do to me,” the knight replied.  
  
“I have done you no injury.”  
  
“You have gained a kindness from my cousin.”  
  
“I did not ask for the kindness nor have I accepted it.” Though the latter might be a lie Sansa thought, the kiss still on her lips.  
  
“Draw your sword, ser,” directed the knight.  
  
“But I have no sword,” she held the knife but she did not draw it, what was she going to do, cut a man’s throat in Lady Harlaw’s practice yard, swish a knife against a sword and get her hand cut to pieces.  
  
She held up her free hand. The knight slashed at her, but then a man jumped out from the shadows, and claimed, “That is my thrall, I do want not him damaged, I have been looking for him for almost an hour.”  
  
“Euron,” claimed the knight and swung the sword at this man, the man drew his own sword and Sansa ran, back through the courtyard, the pretty garden and down the steps to the Sea Gate, to the guard she shouted, “there are men fighting in your practice yard, call your Master-at-Arms, I worry for Lady Harlaw’s safety.”  
  
She ran along the jetty, Gevin jerked awake as she jumped down into the cutter, “quick,” she hissed, realising her hand was bleeding.  
  
  
*  
  
  
“There,” said Merry to Margaery, as they wove through the village’s Market, the Master-at-arms, and his men at their sides.  
  
There certainly was a youth of the right height, with reddish hair, although Margaery would have said it was a darker shade than that of the boy she was seeking. Still there was older man at this boy’s side, he gripped his arm and whispered in his ear, the youth pulled away.  
  
Margaery quickened, the Master-at-arms, the guards, even Merry kept pace with her.  
  
She stopped before the two men, the younger one was not hers, but still, the kink of his hair ran the same way, the shape of his eyes. He might have been a harder, older copy, a boy turned suddenly to a young man. She smiled away her confusion and looked from one man to the other with her most gracious, wide-eyed look.  
  
“Euron Greyjoy,” spat the Master-at-arms.  
  
“Oh kinsman,” she said, “I am pleased to meet you. May I ask why you hold the Prince’s man like that? Has he committed some crime?”  
  
“He’s my thrall. I plucked him from the Drowned God himself.”  
  
“I think that cannot be, why he was in my solar just an hour since, pleading again on behalf of the King’s brother. He has come time and again all week, indeed I can tell you his whole history, and if you had plucked him from the sea, if your shrewdness is true, and not an undeserved reputation, I’m sure you would have hostaged him, not thralled him.” She waited, she could see the threat turning over in Euron Greyjoy’s mouth, so she continued before he could spew it at her, “I came after him, as he has been in some argument with a cousin of mine and I must know there is no offence taken, in fact I need him, so I may relay something to the Prince.” She took the young man’s arm.  
  
“Good day, Captain Greyjoy, commend me to your niece, when you see her.” Margaery pulled the young man swiftly with her towards Ten Towers, knowing the guards had their hands at their swords and were raising their eyebrows at her curious reasoning. She wasn’t sure what the custom was around stealing thralls from people, so she continued at a pace.  
  
“Well I am pleased to see you,” she said looking up at the young man, he looked down at her with an odd mix of grace and fright.  
  
“What was that?” he said.  
  
“You look a little like the person I was looking for,” she replied, “Do you have a younger brother perhaps?”  
  
“Not living,” his voice was quiet then.  
  
“It seems apt for you to be the person I was looking for, for a little while anyway, and I must hope they themselves have sailed home.”  
  
They came through the gate, and the young man’s gravity increased, his chest seemed broader, his shoulders stronger, as if he was somewhere he expected to be, his chin was not a chin she would cup, it was one she would trace with a single finger to draw him towards her.  
  
“Would your master-at-arms provide me with a sword?” he said suddenly.  
  
“Of course,” she said and he turned towards the man who was still a couple of paces behind them, “Not now,” she laughed stopping him with her hand.  
  
“But I should fight him,” the young man said, “He..” but he did not continue.  
  
“Not today, be ruled by me today,” she shook her head and took him up to her solar.  
  
He paced about the room, picking up things and turning them over, as though remembering the existence of parchment, or dice, or pin cushions. Merry brought cakes and spiced wine. The young man did not sit.  
  
“You are Lady Harlaw?” he said.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“What is the Prince’s suit with you?” he said the word prince as if it were a question in itself.  
  
“The obvious suit a lord has for a lady, he asks me to be his wife,” she replied.  
  
“I thought you must be married.” He blushed a little as his eyes went down to the swell of the babe growing within her.  
  
“I am widowed,” Margaery replied, “twice.”  
  
He licked his lips and pushed his hair away, Margaery watched him.  
  
“Would you not marry me, ser?” she inquired.  
  
“Why, do you need me to marry you?” he asked, as if marrying her might be heroic act, or a pledge to repay the good deed she had done him, in conniving him from Euron Greyjoy.  
  
“No, I don’t think so,” she answered, “I was just trying impart that I might be desirable as a wife, even with a babe in my belly.”  
  
He blushed even more, but then there was something else, another look as if he had had a hope that had been shattered.  
  
“I don’t even know your House,” the young man stated.  
  
“No, and I don’t have a hold on what yours might be,” she replied, “I am Lady Margaery of House Tyrell, I am Lady Harlaw of Ten Towers now, and you are welcome here without pledge or name or story, because you require kindness just now.”  
  
Then the babe twisted or kicked and she squirmed inspite of herself. He looked at her, full of concern.  
  
“Should I call,” he began.  
  
“No” she interrupted “It is just the babe moving, here,” she stood up and stepped towards him, “You can feel, if you would like.” He was not embarrassed now, it was something else.  
  
“I had a wife,” he said, but then he held out his hand and she placed it on the kicking babe.  
  
“I think I should keep a hold on my name for now, but know that if you were ever to need me to marry you, I would,” he said rather solemnly.  
  
She laughed “Well let us hope in the meantime you do not find yourself in a further bond which prevents you from keeping your promise.”  
  
  
*  


Theon was in the stable yard, talking to the stable master, when she rode in. She had left Gevin to take down the mast and sail and rode back to Pyke, her heart still pounding.  
  
“What happened?” he asked looking at her hand.  
  
“It’s nothing, a misunderstanding.” But he was taking her hand and unwinding the bit of tunic she had used to bind it, she grimaced with pain, it was stuck to the wound with dried blood.  
  
“Let’s take you to the Maester,” he said, and he was guiding her by the shoulders and although she was barely scratched she found herself leaning into him, her heart didn’t pound and she felt safe.  
  
“Who was it?” Theon asked, now she was sitting, with the scratch anointed and neatly bound.  
  
“Ser Somebody Harlaw, Lady Margery’s cousin by marriage, I think he may have designs upon her himself.”  
  
Theon laughed, but Sansa thought it was hollow, “Perhaps, I should leave her to him, perhaps I should continue to be alone, stirring Iron Island gossip and being no use to anyone.”  
  
“I don’t think she would have him,” Sansa said, “She wants a wolf to woo her. You could do that I’m sure. You must have an idea what wolves are like.”  
  
“You are very like someone I used to know, lad,” he said, as he ruffled her hair and stood up to leave the Maester’s workroom.  
  
I could sew them together Sansa thought, as Theon went out, then sit at their feet, like a pet.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Theon took the youth, and a broad shouldered lad of nineteen that he and Dagmer had decided would be useful in any further love-fuelled skirmishes, to Harlaw. The wind was brisk and he had to direct the youth this way and that as he swung the sail round to pull them into the village’s harbour.  
  
They walked up into the village’s market square, although there was no market today. The village folk nodded their heads at Theon and he had to try not to smirk. The youth had told him that Lady Margaery wouldn’t like it, he had told Theon it was like he was mocking people with his own secret jokes. Theon had agreed he probably was doing that, sometimes, and the youth had seemed very pleased with himself.  
  
“Lord Greyjoy,” a woman’s voice rang out across the square. They turned, there was Lady Margaery, in a green gown, split from just under her tits to reveal her undergown and the swell of the baby. She looked like a wild princess, because she was hurrying towards them, her curls a glorious halo, the gown swooping.  
  
“My Prince,” she said and bobbed briefly, “I’m looking, well I’m looking for somebody, who looks like him,” she gestured to the youth, “I am glad to see you well, I am sorry for the altercation with my kinsman,” she turned back to Theon, “I think he might have gone after your uncle.”  
  
“My Uncle?”  
  
A man stepped forward, Theon realised he was the Master-of-Arms at Ten Towers, “Yesterday,” he said to Theon, “Euron Greyjoy was here, he had young man with him, but Lady Harlaw was able to get him to give up the young man.”  
  
“Do you have a brother? Or cousin? Who looks very like you? With the same eyes? And similar hair?” Lady Margaery said to the youth.  
  
“I don’t any longer,” the youth replied.  
  
“His brother drowned, in the shipwreck that brought him to Harlaw.” Theon told Lady Margaery.  
  
“Oh but…” Lady Margaery began  
  
Just then, there were grunts and the hard clangs of metal.  
  
“Robb” said the youth, and it was the slam in his chest of realising who she was that left Theon five paces behind her, for the man ahead of them had knocked Robb. Robb! Had knocked Robb to the ground and before he was anywhere close to them Sansa had reached the man and hit him in the neck. No, she couldn’t of hit him, Theon realised, because the man was screaming and clutching his neck and turning towards her with the sword. But Theon was there then, and he knocked the sword from the man’s hand and the man fell down or sat down maybe. Sansa was crying now but Theon was holding her tight.  
  
  
*  
  
  
When his sister sailed home, Lady Margaery held a feast for the King.  
  
The baby was a month old then and it was the kind of baby that demanded to be held and walked around and bounced slightly. Robb had dark circles under his eyes because he was quite willing to walk around most of the night bouncing the baby, even though there were nursemaids, and the baby’s actual mother. Theon thought Margaery might have been quite happy to give the baby to Robb for a good few years at least. There was not a wet nurse yet, though, and Theon had tried to tease Sansa about the becoming milk swell of Lady Margaery’s breasts but Sansa had just flicked her hand towards him as if she were slapping him and walked off.  
  
After Yara had been told the tale of Euron’s demise and the aftermath, which was essentially lots of confused shouting, until Margaery had interrupted everyone by saying I think I should go into the Maester now, because actually she had been having contractions on and off for the past hour, they went up to the solar.  
  
Yara said, “I don’t understand this,” waving her hand across the four of them. “I heard you were looking to get married, little brother,” she continued.  
  
Theon was standing behind the seated Stark siblings, he ruffled both their hair at once.  
  
“Well I’d marry a redhead who came stand with me in the sea,” he said.  
  
Margaery had her feet across both of them and the baby feeding at her breast.  
  
“Well I’d marry a redhead who came to me with a beautiful cloak,” she said.  
  
Robb’s head was nodding against the settle.  
  
“Thank the gods he didn’t hear either of you,” said Sansa.


End file.
